Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are expenses involved in using a road even when it's not full.
Like what? What costs more if the road has a single additional car?
The additional wear on the road.
“You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”
71–80 of 165 posts
Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you ever published a paper in an academic venue? What publishers offered was delivering paper versions of articles to your local research library. Now they only host PDFs online. Apart from that their added-value work is negligible. The biggest improvement I've seen by a publisher of one of my papers was changing "Sec." to "Sect." when I was referencing section, and putting page number in blue rather than black…
>Also, not all open access journal are charging author, that is a lie installed by publishers lobbying (and this is how they actually spend money). You can research "diamond open access" or "overlay journal" for some examples of economical models where journal are high quality, open access and free to submit to. Those all seem to be sponsored. That won't scale to every paper unless some large organization funds it. T…
> Those all seem to be sponsored.
Even if that is true I would rather see public money sponsoring real open access journals than spend paying author fees and subscription to closed access and hybrid journals.
> As long as their expenses are >60% of revenue,
What I truly question is the nature of these expenses. From my point of view inside academia in the field of computer science, and knowing a lot of people in other fields of academia, the actual work put by publishers in the final product that is a published scientific paper is close to zero (except for those fields where there is layout work because they do not use readymade LaTeX documentclasses).
Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”
#73But if scientific papers were free, how could nations avoid a free-rider issue regarding other nations? For instance, a major part of scientific research is done in US, isn't it? Does that mean that the US tax payer should be the major contributor to an hypothetical worldwide scientific activity?
For instance, a major part of scientific research is done in US, isn't it? A good part, roughly on par with Europe, Japan, Russia, and China (number of papers is hardly a measure of scientific production anyway): https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/20k5dk/top... Does that mean that the US tax payer should be the major contributor to an hypothetical worldwide scientific activity? All tax payers on this p…
> All tax payers on this planet (at least those living in a country with sizeable research spending) already contribute to the worldwide scientific knowledge. I believe this is a good thing.
Then you still get a free-rider problem, regarding all people that did not pay taxes for this research. You can ignore the issue but tax payers may not.
Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you ever published a paper in an academic venue? What publishers offered was delivering paper versions of articles to your local research library. Now they only host PDFs online. Apart from that their added-value work is negligible. The biggest improvement I've seen by a publisher of one of my papers was changing "Sec." to "Sect." when I was referencing section, and putting page number in blue rather than black…
>Also, not all open access journal are charging author, that is a lie installed by publishers lobbying (and this is how they actually spend money). You can research "diamond open access" or "overlay journal" for some examples of economical models where journal are high quality, open access and free to submit to. Those all seem to be sponsored. That won't scale to every paper unless some large organization funds it. T…
Where are you digging up the 20% to 40% profit margin?
Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
SciHub can and does do it for less. It's the whole point of the article.
SciHub piggybacks on the publishers' work. Stealing the output of a company and giving it away does not mean you can do their work for less.
It's the researcher who produced and typeset the article; the publisher does nothing more than hosting PDFs sent directly from the authors after they passed peer review, which is not something the publisher is involved with.
Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”
#76I think the most important point was brushed over in the article--that journals offer prestige. Scientists are entirely aware of the problems, yet they still volunteer to submit their work to them, because they significantly improve the chances of promotion and tenure. These things are already tremendously competitive, so most would rather not volunteer for a handicap by publishing in other venues.
If it's truly misaligned incentives [ie universities are more likely to promote researchers who publish in "top" journals], then it seems like a high-powered university needs to change their criteria for promotion. Instead of requiring publication in top journals for promo, look at other metrics for quality [I imagine this differs some from one field to another]. Imagine if every conference charged speakers for speak…
You get promotions and tenure for doing successful grant work that brings in money to the University. You get the best grants by publishing in Science and Nature. The government (main source of grants) shares the blame here.
Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Also, not all open access journal are charging author, that is a lie installed by publishers lobbying (and this is how they actually spend money). You can research "diamond open access" or "overlay journal" for some examples of economical models where journal are high quality, open access and free to submit to. Those all seem to be sponsored. That won't scale to every paper unless some large organization funds it. T…
> Those all seem to be sponsored. Even if that is true I would rather see public money sponsoring real open access journals than spend paying author fees and subscription to closed access and hybrid journals. > As long as their expenses are >60% of revenue, What I truly question is the nature of these expenses. From my point of view inside academia in the field of computer science, and knowing a lot of people in othe…
>Even if that is true I would rather see public money sponsoring real open access journals than spend paying author fees and subscription to closed access and hybrid journals.
That's a legitimate argument. Shifting around who pays what may very well result in positive externalities. But merely complaining about publisher profits while ignoring their costs doesn't work.
Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If it is free then tax payers will have to pay more to make sure it is available. That's necessarily true. It's true that universities pay for journal subscriptions, but I guess a significant portion (or even all) of that expense is covered by the overheads universities charge grants. Given that a significant number of grants are taxpayer-paid, it's likely that tax payers are already paying for the journal subscrip…
It's also a much greater undertaking for any individual person to purchase one of those subscriptions, I don't think I've ever heard of a single person doing so where they didn't have some portion of it covered by an employer where the field is relevant, or a university. Anyone have any rough numbers on what this would cost Joe Schmo to buy?
> Anyone have any rough numbers on what this would cost Joe Schmo to buy?
There's a huge variety. An individual subscription to Nature is $200/year[0], but they often charge $30 for electronic access to individual articles.
An institutional subscription to the Astrophysical Journal is $2000/year[1], though if you're a member of a professional society, you can buy an individual, electronic subscription for $25[e.g., 2]. As a point of comparison within astronomy, a similarly prestigious journal, the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society institutional subscription is $9400/year[in the csv link in 3].
[0] http://www.nature.com/ecommerce/subscribe.action?productId=n...
[1] https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/0004-637X/page/Pricing%20...
[2] https://aas.org/individual-membership/dues-subscription-fees
[3] http://www.oxfordjournals.org/en/access-purchase/pricing-and...
Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Also, not all open access journal are charging author, that is a lie installed by publishers lobbying (and this is how they actually spend money). You can research "diamond open access" or "overlay journal" for some examples of economical models where journal are high quality, open access and free to submit to. Those all seem to be sponsored. That won't scale to every paper unless some large organization funds it. T…
Where are you digging up the 20% to 40% profit margin?
Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”
#80I hate how copyright now lasts indefinitely. There are many papers from the 50's by people who are dead, and these companies are still claiming ownership over them. Copyright should last a relatively short time, and maybe be even shorter if you don't pay a fee to get it extended. Perhaps even a special exemption for scientific research.
If you could read all papers published 10 years ago for free, that would be incredible, even if it still cost $35 to read a new paper.
See the science section here: https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2016/pre-1976
>1959 was another noteworthy year for science. C. P. Snow presented The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, an influential lecture about the gulf between the sciences and the humanities. The programming language COBOL was developed. Martin Gardner published the Three Prisoners Problem, a probability theory paradox, in his “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American. Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison published Searching for Interstellar Communications, a foundational work for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, in the journal Nature.
>If you follow the link from Nature above (and you do not have a subscription or institutional access), you will see that this 1959 article is behind a paywall. You can purchase it for $32. A distressing number of scientific articles from 1959 require payment or a subscription or account, including those in major journals such as Science and JAMA. And the institutional access that many top scientists enjoy is not guaranteed—even institutions such as Harvard have considered canceling their subscriptions because they could no longer afford the escalating prices of major journal subscriptions.